Odalisque

Several women animators connect their work to the history of art in ways that allow them to reconstitute woman’s place—no longer the object of male desire, but as the controlling subject. Maureen Selwood‘s Odalisque is, perhaps, the best example.

Made with the aid of romance and adventure—as a cafe artist and an opera singer—in these dreams, Selwood deflates as male fantasies the romantic conventions usually associated with these constructs. In each sequence, she escapes conventional confines that would relegate women to passivity or death and flows back to her living room, her visually nurturant world. Selwood calls attention to a more naturalistic figuration as the basis for a realism regarding women in Western art. Two styles are juxtaposed in a jarring fashion, fluid, graceful motion associated with the feminine against the disintegration and evaporation of form associated with the cartoon world using drawn animation with graphite and colored pencil.